FOR generations of Liverpool schoolchildren, North Wales simply means Colomendy.

The estate, near Loggerheads, was bought in 1939 by the Government as part of a chain of residential camps for evacuees.

Nearly 600 children could be housed there in safety away from the expected Blitz, and the first occupants were pupils and teachers from Dingle Girls and Boys Secondary schools.

Edna McCumiskey was underwhelmed: “I didn't enjoy my time and was keen to get home.

“We could hear the bombers going overhead each night and watched Liverpool being bombed – the city just glowed every night.

“We all worried that our parents had been killed.” Officially, Colomendy was part of the National Camps Corporation, the NCC, but it was not long before some Liverpool wit renamed it Nazi Concentration Camp.

For others, it was a first taste of the countryside, and after the war it continued to be used by Liverpool city council, both as a boarding school for children facing difficulties, and as an outdoor education and pursuits centre.

Some 10,000 children a year passed through in the 1980s and 90s as part of their GCSE and National Curriculum studies.

“We’d always walk up Moel Famau, kidding the children there was a cafe at the top, to encourage them up the hill,” admits teacher Alec Butler.